 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine VCE. Innovating the world's first Converged Infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade. Say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. We're back, this is Dave Vellante and this is the Converged Infrastructure Spotlight at EMC World 2014. This, of course, is the Cube. We go out to the events, we extract a signal from the noise. Dave Hardis here, he's the Executive Vice President and COO of Presidio, and he's joined by Manu Thomas, who is the Vice President of Solutions, one of the lead architects at this solutions provider and partner of VCE. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube, good to see you. Thanks, great to be here. Thank you for having us. Dave, let's start with you. Talk about, let's start with Presidio. What's the company all about and how long you've been around and what's your specialty? So we've been around since 2004. We're a pretty large size, over a $2 billion integrator here in the US. We focus primarily with data center cloud technology as well as security, mobility, collaboration and core network infrastructure. So you operate primarily customers in the US. And what kind of industry size of customer paint a picture for us? So I would say anywhere between that 1,000, 2,000 seat all the way up through the Fortune 100. We do service customers internationally, but our primary sales and marketing is happening here in the US. Vertically, we cut across, oh I think the solutions we're bringing to market are very horizontal in nature, so there's probably no vertical that we're not playing in in some manner of fashion, some more than others, but really, if you're a consumer of IT and IT is a strategic party of business, the city is there for you. Vanu, so I want to turn to you as the lead architect, one of the lead architects at the company. A lot has changed since 2004, obviously. One of those big changes was, of course, converged infrastructure. I mean, up until that point, you had new architectures, things like thin provisioning and data deduplication, a lot of so-called feature products that were interesting, but not really necessarily game-changing. And then on comes this notion of converged infrastructure. Talk about how that has affected how you architect solutions. Yeah, that's a great question. So I think, fundamentally, what we are seeing in the industry out there is this move towards cloud-based solutions. The customers want faster agility, time to market, and they want to try and leverage cloud-based solutions. What we've seen in the converging infrastructure space, especially with VCE, is it really plays into that particular strength. What we've seen with our customers is when they want an infrastructure that is quicker, that is more agile, that's faster for them to go to market, we've seen converging infrastructures like VCE able to fit that particular segment. So we're able to bring the converging infrastructure quicker to market, quicker time to deploy for the customers, and in turn, it helps them be quicker and more agile with their customers, and it enables them to grow their business much faster. Did you all have to change your business somewhat? A lot of the nasty, heavy lifting that was being done when you had to do your own compute and storage and networking, you guys would presume we'd do a lot of that for customers. When you first saw VBlock come out, you'd say, oh boy, now they're sort of going after our business, or did you say, okay, it's a natural evolution of systems, we'll just keep going up the stack. Talk about that a little bit, Dave. That's the natural evolution of our industry, really. If you think about it, you can go back to PCs. There was a whole industry around kitting together pieces and parts to make PCs, but they evolved into, you just, who'd buy a clone? The homebrew club. Yeah, no, clone PCs. Our job as integrators is to constantly be moving up that stack. So we embraced it from the get go, from the initial launch of the first VBlock back when it was Acadia, it looked to us like it was a good trade. So yeah, we might lose a little bit of professional services to kid all this together, but the ability to take something that robust in terms of a solution to market so that we can start really moving from virtualized infrastructure to true private cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructure, you really need conversion infrastructure, VBlock underneath that to do it right. So it was great for us. We just had two gentlemen from Apollo on, they talked about how essentially what they were doing was replicating cloud infrastructure within their on-premise environment. Is that what people are doing with your solutions? And I wonder if you could, so talk about that a little bit more, because everybody's been talking about doing that. I remember we've been talking to, it's converged infrastructure since we first saw it back in 2009, and that's what everybody wanted to do, but when you really started to peel the onion, they weren't doing it yet. But it feels like here we are in 2014, IT is finally closing that gap with that notion of cloud. Is that fair, and can you talk about it and talk about any examples? Yeah, so the fundamental premise, again, I go back to this is people wanted to go to the cloud because of a couple of reasons, right? They wanted the quicker time to market, which I mentioned, there was a perceived notion of it being cheaper. And then the third reason that they wanted to do it is when they wanted a particular resource, they would get it on demand. So what VCE did with the convergent infrastructure is they bought couple of those critical components inside the private cloud. One of the biggest concerns with the public cloud was the whole security notion and the performance notion. With the VCE infrastructure, you're able to now bring those same advantages that you had with the public cloud, but then in a more secure and having better performance considerations. But what we've also done at Presidio is, Dave mentioned this earlier, we've also given an add-on on top of the VBlock, which is the ability for us to do full-fledged management orchestration on top of a VBlock and also be in a position to offer capacity on demand with the VBlock. So we could essentially mimic a public cloud inside a private cloud environment with the security and the performance features. So can we talk about security a little bit? I get two, we do a lot of these CUBE interviews, right? You get two ends of the spectrums. You just said that you can do it more secure than you get in the public cloud. I wonder if we could unpack that a little bit. Why is on-premise and why are your clients able to build something that's more secure than the public cloud, I could say. Public cloud has all these resources, all these PhDs running around, giant scale, they spend tons of money on security. Why is that? Well, to begin with, the public cloud infrastructure is built on a premise of multi-tenancy. So for them to make the efficiencies, the cost efficiencies work, they essentially have to put multiple customers under one single physical infrastructure. Now, what they claim is the fact that there is adequate security between those tenants. So it's like saying Coke and Pepsi existing on the same infrastructure. Now, if you're a customer, are you really going to believe that? And can you then ask the public cloud provider to show you all the security technologies and architectures and methodologies they've used to protect that asset? I don't think they really want to delve into that. You're secure, until you're not. Yes. Ha ha ha ha ha. All right, I'm feeling secure today. Talk to me tomorrow. And all the technology, all the process will not change the fact that if you're in a multi-tenant environment, you have exposure not only to other providers but to the greater operation that's there. Whereas in a hybrid cloud, I mean, I'm sorry, a private cloud, you can control your own destiny and there's no one to point to but yourself in terms of where does the buck stop? And then to be able to take advantage of those public cloud capabilities, maybe you don't have them on-prem, you don't have the resource or maybe it's an elastic sort of resource, that's where a hybrid cloud comes in. And Venue was talking about our city of managed cloud offer where we can come in and we can create this orchestration layer for you and we can have private cloud service catalog items for you, your unit's development environment, your SAP environment. And then if you need to get to salesforce.com or some sort of public cloud capability, we can build that into your service catalog. So we don't have this rogue IT thing happening where business units are doing whatever they want. They come to the service catalog. If it's not in the service catalog, we'll put it in the service catalog so there's command and control across there and to press. The vast majority of public clouds are multi-tenant. The one I can think of that's not is ServiceNow. And actually if you look at their numbers, they're substantially better than the other public cloud suppliers. If you line them up to Amazon, Workday, Salesforce, et cetera, the ServiceNow non-multi-tenant is actually superior. What about availability? Is that a factor or can you architect around that in the public cloud? So if you look at, and I'm going to use Amazon Web Services as an example, even if you look at what their CTO has said, he basically said, look, infrastructure, we don't build infrastructure that's highly available, highly redundant. We expect the applications to be able to do that high availability and high redundancy. So in the case of public cloud, what we've seen with many of our customers is when they actually migrate the legacy application, it breaks, right? And we've already seen a lot of instances when these applications fail in the public cloud because the public cloud infrastructure, number one is multi-tenant so it's got that security problem but it's not built as a resilient and reliable infrastructure. They expect the application to essentially do that work for them. So now you're talking about our customers having to rewrite their legacy applications and that's a significant investment. Yeah, you're not seeing a lot of high volume transaction processing going on in the public cloud. I mean, yet anyway, it's going to take a long time to launch those applications. It's mainly dev and test right now that we see. You know, at the same time, I wonder if I get your opinion on this. We used to say the same thing about VMware, remember? It wasn't that long ago, we were saying, oh, VMware are largely test and dev and Merit said, we're going to go after every workload, any application and they've seemingly done that. Well, that happened with the public cloud or is it a different animal in your view? I don't think the public cloud is going away. I think it will grow almost concentric circles. We've always built highly available infrastructure. We'll continue to do that and we'll always use service providers. You know, we used to call them ASPs. Yeah, yeah, sure. And before that, we called them service bureaus, right? So that's- Time-sharing. Yeah, the model, you know- I've been around a long time. Yeah, me too, right? Got the hairline to prove it. But they, you know, they're going to, those services will evolve and they'll grow and they'll be integrated. And again, this is the natural maturity of our business and our industry. We're not doing this to make it more complex. We're doing it to take advantage of new capabilities. Another interesting thing that came out of the Apollo case study was in terms of the organizational structure, they essentially said, we brought in the capability and then it catalyzed an organizational change. Do you find that a lot with the customers? I'm always advising customers, you better figure out your organization before you bring in this converged infrastructure, but I'm starting to rethink that. Maybe if you do that, you'll never bring in the converged infrastructure. If you bring in the converged infrastructure, is it like breaking some eggs and actually catalyzing an organizational change? How are organizations changing as a result of this new technology? So what we've seen is organizations who essentially waited and then said, let's try and figure out our people and process before we actually bring these converged infrastructure technologies. They've been waiting for a long time. What we've seen is, and when they've been waiting, they've seen the emergence and the birth of the shadow IT and the rogue IT and things like that. What we've seen is when you actually sort of push the converged infrastructure in, so we've had customers who said, hey, I don't care what you guys do, I want a private cloud, hybrid cloud infrastructure right now, ready to go and provision new applications. We've sort of seen that sort of, let's push this converged infrastructure, this private cloud thing, really start making changes for our clients. Excellent. Well, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Dave, I'll give you last word. EFC World 2014. We're seeing massive changes. We're hearing all the software defines the federation and flash changes, converged infrastructure. What's the sort of bumper sticker that you'd put on? EMC World 2014 from Presidio standpoint. As you're pulled away from Las Vegas, what's the bumper sticker say? Yeah, I think we're enabling the private and hybrid cloud. Great, excellent. Dave, Benu, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having us. Pleasure to have you guys. Thank you. Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest. This is day two. We're live at EMC World 2014, almost at 2012. We'll be right back.